


A Crack in the Mirror

by Nemonus



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Dinosaurs, Dishonored Big Bang 2017, Gen, Low Chaos Emily Kaldwin, flesh and steel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 12:08:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11646261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Emily Kaldwin, the empress who refused the mark of the Outsider, nevertheless carries the power of the Timepiece into Dunwall Tower. In a city where magic use is both heretical and common, the debate between Emily, Delilah, and the Outsider about how and when to break the laws of the universe threatens to strand Emily in an unraveling time-stream.





	A Crack in the Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> Oh look, it's my first Big Bang! Thanks to my beta [voidseance](http://voidseance.tumblr.com/) and artist [acatone](http://acatone.tumblr.com/). The full cover art for this fic can be found on tumblr [here](http://ir-anuk.tumblr.com/post/163562348664/a-crack-in-the-mirror-dishonored-big-bang-2017).

_“Even magic is perverted here, and things don’t work like they should.”_  
  
 Emily Kaldwin knew that if she tried to laugh she would cough, so instead she made the bitterness into a smile and kept walking. The shadows of the Dust District loomed behind her. Aramis Stilton was alive and sane, Delilah’s ritual of rebirth had been revealed, and Stilton’s business and his mansion were both prosperous. In the glass of the timepiece she saw miners and guards alternating, one timeline or another of alert men and women as she flicked the panels open and closed in watchful nervousness. She sidestepped people out of time as she walked down the stairs.  
  
She had done some good here, maybe. She had turned a Dust District choking on its own industry into one ruled by a more benevolent lord. Her kingdom appeared writ in small, here in the birdsong courtyard. She could pull satisfaction from that, a sharp reserve of victory like a richly flavored piece of meat. Emily wanted to go home.  
  
Whether home meant Dunwall Tower or the Dreadful Wale now, she wasn’t sure.  
  
She knew where it wasn’t, though. As she passed a man sweeping what had once been a ruined courtyard, she recalled the Outsider’s words. Perverted, as if the absence of magic made any difference to Emily. She had wanted to be unlike her father in only one way, and so the spirit of the whales hadn’t marked her hand. She had requested the Outsider withhold the Void’s magic from her, and like a good courtier, he had obeyed.  
  
That refusal had forced her to be hard and silent. Corvo had had an advantage over so many of the people he fought, Emily realized. He had never expected her to be offered the dark bargain, though, and so he had taught her to fight in more conventional Kaldwin ways, with garrote and hinged sword. Many times in Karnaca she had wished that she could disappear at will, could leap across a courtyard in the blink of an eye. But the sky looked sickly and sounded like the ballads of the Outsider then, and she did not regret trading danger for freedom.  
  
(Oh how the Outsider had shown his disgust, though, with a look of scorn that she could not imagine any courtiers giving her. Alexi Mayhew might have given her that look if Emily had done something particularly foolhardy. Seeing it again was refreshing.)  
  
She pushed one of the Stilton estate one doors open and headed for the second, reassured by the solid sound of the wooden door swinging shut behind her. Nothing would attack her in here. She was sword and skin alone, and those had brought her this far.  
  
(The Overseers who had helped install her as empress had thanked Corvo for his long-ago victory, over and over with a sly suspicion. _Just like your father,_ they would tell Emily, and mean nothing of the sort. They suspected that Corvo had used some trickery in his dealings with Daud and gloated over the opportunity to prove it. Only one of them had seemed sincere, a young man who once looked from Emily to a painting of Jessamine and back in calm awe. She agreed with at least one part of their sacraments when it came to avoiding magic’s call, although it was almost certainly not for the same reasons they did.)  
  
She took hold of the cold door handle outside Aramis Stilton’s mansion, and was dragged backward.  
  
It felt like something had tangled around her ankles. The touch was wispy and cold. She imagined a pallid nest keeper, a person desiccated and lost, curling long finger-claws around her ankles and pulling like she pulled at the floor to try to escape—  
  
Then the tugging stopped and the blue-silver air of the Void filled up her vision.  
  
She fell. Arms flailing, she tucked in tight and loosened up in time to roll with a landing she couldn’t see coming.  
  
She didn’t land. The Outsider caught her, one more Void-thing looking down on the crumbling Void-things around her. His pale face wore no expression at all, although she looked for one in the crinkles around his black eyes, in the pain in her own wrist. None, like the blankness on the face of a slaughterhouse whale. He hauled her up, threw her on a slate ground from which she pushed herself up again. He started talking.  
  
Emily listened in a restless fugue. She had heard rumors of the Outsider’s birth before. He explained to her what had killed him, what had remade him.  
  
Corvo had never told her this. She wondered if Corvo had ever seen the Outsider like this, on his back with a bared throat. Again, she thought of fat and meat.  
  
The Void felt crowded close to him, the kind of close to him she had been when she was a child and he visited her in her dreams. Nightmares of things terrible and curling, but comfortable; nests of snakes or fronds of the strange wrack-weed people fished out of the sea. She had rested in a nest of it, comforted by the cold, but a comfort that was only suitable for a child. If she wished to regain it now she would have to change in ways that felt like mutilation. She had already decided not take up the bargain her father had made, to use the powers of the Void in the world. She would find a new way to know the Outsider.  
  
And besides, her chest hurt. She would have thought the pressure came from an injury if she had been stiff or wounded in this particular mansion. She hadn’t been, so it was just family-worry, court-worry, and it would be gone after a drink and a sit down.  
  
The Outsider had sounded almost pained when he talked about the hole in the Void that Delilah had left behind. Something in his words had been flinching.  
  
“…but her will and cunning are second to none.”  
  
“We’ll see about that,” Emily said.  
  
It was an interruption, and worse: one that Emily had made out of spite and anger instead of any grand strategy. The Outsider gave her that scornful glare again so that she knew it. It was so rare that he talked to her, though. So often, his voice was like an audiograph from years ago, or like a painting; he spoke about things that happened as if he did not participate in them. In the same way that Emily had refused his Mark, she felt a powerful satisfaction in interrupting his messages.  
  
“You have done well so far to move through this weeping city without our magic,” the Outsider said, looking at her with his head cocked like a seabird. “But Delilah pinned all her hopes on that magic, like pinning a moth to a card. Are your hopes so singular?”  
  
“No.” Emily answered quickly, because it was true. He hadn’t spoken about her refusal before, and the sudden attention was jarring.  
  
His expression twisted, and she thought that maybe she saw jealousy on the pale face.  
  
Then he showed her exactly how Delilah had made herself immortal, that day with Abele and Stilton and the rest. The Outsider’s composure returned, although the pained expression returned too when a hole opened up in the Void behind her, a tunnel of light with a sound like a dying sigh. The Outsider rubbed at his collar as if something hurt him. Emily left him.  
  
While she soft-footed back to the docks she flicked the timepiece open again, like a nervous courtier with a pocket watch. The tide was lower in the Dust District past, the air clearer. Meagan and Sokolov were waiting.  
  
The Outsider had been peeved - not a conniving courtier but a disappointed subject. He had said that Delilah had hurt him. What impressions did they share in the Void, those whale-currents twining together with the spilled and burning oil of Delilah’s ambition? Emily had washed her hands of them, had dried her skin to find no trace of the Mark. She remembered a painting in the back rooms of Dunwall Tower, a dark inscription. The slaughtered boy with the blank face.  
  
She shook her head, trying to dispel the dark thoughts that clung like tattered cloth. She had tried to cut magic off from her. It kept reaching, though. Delilah and the Outsider circled one another, taking bites, and Emily waited on the outside, the only one of the trinity who didn’t live in a painting of her own murder.

* * *

On the Dreadful Wale, Emily Kaldwin drank a cup of hot, black tea, wrote in her journal, and then walked outside to find Meagan Foster. The timepiece was a tangle of metal and glass, hanging from a cord through a belt loop beside Emily’s spyglass. Like the Heart, it bled Void-stuff. Instead of whispers it sat in a sense of bitter calm.  
  
The hallways felt empty, the air so still as to be stagnant. The sound of clanging echoed from the lower decks. Emily remembered that perhaps she had gotten used to the movement of the ship, then chastised herself for not thinking of that earlier. Finding her sea legs, whalers would call it. Empress Emily Kaldwin, in her tower by the sea, had never learned to _walk_ on a _ship_ , another sign of her coddled life.  
  
Emily pushed open a belowdecks door. The engine room sat low and smelling of oil. Meagan was standing with her back to the stairwell, batting at the air with both hands.  
  
Both hands! Emily squinted. The arm that she had last seen bound in a dirty knot at the amputated end was now whole and healthy. Meagan had helped Stilton - had Emily's manipulation of the timeline inside the manor fixed something for her too?  
  
Meagan was battling bloodflies. The familiar sound rose around the engine room, and Emily remembered Meagan mentioning something about a swarm in passing. Emily had seen the opened tank in Sokolov’s makeshift laboratory, but luckily, the flies had never interrupted her breakfasts.  
  
“Do you need help?” Emily called as Meagan waved her arms.  
  
“I thought I could clear them out.” Meagan waved once more and then backed toward her. Emily saw the cloud of black and red flies rise behind her, all needles and wings. “Turns out it’s harder to guide a swarm around corners than I thought.”  
  
“I’m impressed you even tried!”  
  
“Just like big bumblebees …” Meagan grunted as a bloodfly buzzed over her head.  
  
Emily had tried to avoid bloodflies and their nestkeepers as often as possible, but she had killed enough of them to know how they died. “Let me.”  
  
Meagan retreated to the bottom of the stairs and looked at her with that steel-edged trust she had shown since she had first rescued Emily from Dunwall Tower after the second coup. “Do it.”  
  
Emily edged past the other woman, brushing her shoulder against the arm that hadn’t existed last time Emily had seen her.  
  
When she drew her folded sword the swarm reacted like a prize fighter, heavy shoulders thrown back and stinging hands thrust elastically forward. Emily waded in, driving her blade into one insect with a precise jab into the black, dripping abdomen before the others reacted. Cornered, the flies buzzed more loudly and dove for her. As she stabbed, missing some of the abdomens and bursting the distended blood sacs instead, she saw Meagan smothering one fly in her jacket against the wall behind her.  
  
The last specimen ran, arrowing for the doorway. Emily picked it out of the air with a neat stab. The fly fell at Meagan’s feet, and the captain lifted her toes over it before deciding, with a disgusted expression, to crush what was left of the body under her boot. Black blood dotted the engine room, mixing with oil in one low place to make a slick rainbow across the deck.  
  
Meagan nodded at her in thanks. “You’ve done me a lot of services today.”  
  
“Don’t worry about it. We’re not nearly even.”  
  
“There’s little reckoning when it comes to things like what you did.” Did she rub at her arm, or was Emily just interpreting the movement that way? Meagan gingerly picked a shredded piece of wing, marbled like stained glass, off of her jacket sleeve and crumbled it into dust.  
  
Emily sheathed her blade and leaned against the sooty wall. “I think I might have given Stilton some peace.”  
  
“I think you might have too. What’s your next step?”  
  
“I’m hoping that Stilton can tell me.”  
  
“He came in overnight,” Meagan said. “He’s upstairs with Sokolov.”  
  
“I saw them on my way here. I learned a lot about Delilah, too. I think we may have a way to trap her. This time, it will be permanent.”  
  
“Good.” Meagan folded her arms, showing no sign of being unfamiliar with the limb that had been missing. “There’s something else, too. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to - I didn’t put my trust in the Kaldwins just to question them, although you and your father are both good at keeping your promises. You brought a trinket back from that house, something I can hardly see. But when I look out the corner of my eye, there’s something familiar. It feels like Daud’s witchery. You usually don’t.”  
  
She wasn’t talking about the Heart, then. Emily crossed her arms in imitation and told the truth. “I think I stole something from the Outsider.” Saying it felt as if she might be swallowed up by darkness. The words were true, though, weren’t they? The Outsider hadn’t seemed to notice when she brought the Timepiece with her into the Void. Now, the timepiece still hung at her belt. “Can you see it?”  
  
“Like a fog. The whole world looked a bit like that when I Blinked. It used to be that I could almost fly, Emily. But looking at that is like pea soup fog.”  
  
“It was given to me in Stilton’s mansion. It’s a timepiece.” She opened the glass leaves. The Dreadful Wale’s reflection swam at her, but then the glass panes changed and she saw water, deep and almost black. Something worse than bloodflies and older than whales could live in that expanse of salt water. She shut the timepiece before her throat could close. “It just shows me the ocean now.”  
  
“Of course it does. Always moving.” Meagan turned so that she was facing the same direction as Emily, looking at the engine where she thought the tangle of darkness that was the timepiece might be.  
  
“What do you think of it?” Emily asked.  
  
Meagan furrowed her brow. “I think I don’t have to tell you that the Outsider’s gifts always ask for something in return. It isn’t a price, exactly. It’s more like a promise. You’re given only what you can handle, so if you’re given a lot there’s a lot thrown at you to make it worth it.” And she rubbed at her arm.  
  
“This will be useful,” Emily said. “I wouldn’t have been able to get through Stilton’s mansion without it. But it makes me feel …” Cold, she didn’t say.  
  
“Like you’re being watched?”  
  
“Not exactly. Did you feel like you were being watched when you used your powers?”  
  
Meagan laughed once. “With them I can keep from being watched as well as you can. If that black-eyed one wants to watch me he’ll just find an old captain.”  
  
Emily closed the glass leaves. “I prefer to feel like I’m the one doing the watching. It might come in handy.”  
  
Would she be betraying her carefully negotiated absence from the Void to use it? Would it be a royal card in her royal sleeve? If Meagan thought any of those things, she did not say them.  
  
Instead, she headed for the stairs. “If you gut Delilah as cleanly as those flies there’ll be an empire to clean up in the morning.”  
  
Emily followed her. “That’s another thing. Knowing what Delilah is … just makes me more determined to push her off that throne.”  
  
“She’s surrounded by magic and you pick it off like pulling out a tick. Watch it doesn’t get in your blood.”  
  
“Don’t worry,” Emily said. “It won’t.”  
  
Meagan laughed. “I know. You didn’t take the magic like your father did, and sometimes I wonder if you should have. Things might have been easier for us.”  
  
Watching Meagan’s hand grip and release the wooden railing, Emily waited a moment before she took offense. The offense was there, though, rising fast after the implication that she should have put aside her own plan just to make things easier for a pirate she hadn’t even met yet - but no. For a friend. They had come into the stairwell, where light from the cleverly placed windows toward the bow channeled the day belowdecks.  
  
Emily put a hand on Meagan’s shoulder. “It would have made things easier. I know. But I thought that it was best…” And here she hesitated. Who was it best for, that the empress had refused the Outsider’s powers? For Dunwall? For the Kaldwin family? For the Abbey? Which would be most or least presumptuous to speak of in front of a woman who was in the process of repaying her own deeply personal, deeply apolitical debts?  
  
Meagan blurred, and transversed herself to the top of the nearest flight of stairs. Black smoke whipped in spirals like oil in water. Her power produced an effect Emily had never known Corvo’s to do: a musty but not unpleasant smell, like the floor thick with fungus and dirt inside a cave. At the top of the stairs Meagan gripped the railing again and hunched, tired, like an old woman.  
  
“We never paid much attention to the Outsider, when we were whalers,” Meagan said. “Cannibalizing bones and other creatures’ flesh. That way might have suited the name. But you know, there was less talk there of the Abbey than anywhere else.”  
  
Emily started up the stairs. Would Meagan want to talk about Daud? Emily had worked out the anagram of the boat’s name during a sleepless night, playing with the spelling in her journal alongside doodles of trinkets and cups. Daud, who had killed her mother. He was a bogeyman, although she could always tell that Corvo’s feelings toward the assassin were more complicated than just enmity. Corvo had spared Daud, after all. Maybe that was part of the reason Meagan was here.  
  
And she had betrayed Daud to Delilah, too. Meagan had many reasons to see her presence now as an act of atonement.  
  
Emily considered being politick, then discarded the idea. Finally, she was in a place where being forward was more appreciated. “Even with Delilah?”  
  
Meagan sighed. It wasn’t a sound of regret; there was a sharpness in it that indicated Emily might have made the wrong choice. Meagan didn’t want to talk about Delilah. She turned toward one of the windows, staring at the watery sunlight where it highlighted dust on the floor. “Let me tell you something in particular about Delilah. I trusted her to fight when she needed to. To lend a hand. Daud was getting slow, I thought. Slow to do even something like rescue our people from the Abbey, something I thought was as obvious as the sun on the ocean. He thought too much.”  
  
“His blade killed my mother. I’d hope he started to think after that,” Emily snapped.  
  
Meagan took her words in stride. “That is exactly what he did. At the time, I thought he regretted too much. I understand now that it wasn’t about that. But Delilah won’t regret anything.” Meagan met Emily’s eyes. “Delilah has a way of convincing her people, making them love her. Maybe she loves them. But not in the way Daud did, not in a real way. I think you can teach her, Emily, the way your father did Daud.”  
  
Corvo, the assassin who never killed when he could help it. Meagan was right about what he would have wanted.  
  
Emily caught herself before she could go on any further with thinking about her father as if he were dead.  
  
She wanted to ask Meagan more about Corvo, but the captain leaned against the window and looked out at the sea, and would not answer her again.

* * *

 Sokolov told her how to get into the Duke’s palace, and Emily returned to her room just to clean her sword of the bloodfly mess. When she wrapped her hand around the cold mug of tea, the soft sensation lulled her. She would just sit down for a minute. Sit down and think of Wyman and her hideaway in Dunwall Tower, of places warm and smelling of smoke.  
  
The chair wasn’t comfortable, but it swiveled. If she kicked her feet against the desk just so she could lean …  
  
She woke up with a sense of insistence and impatience in her mind or in the world. At first she couldn’t tell which, but when she stood up from the chair the air echoed in the way that told her she wasn’t really asleep. The Void had not come to her so often before, and she hoped that it would not make a habit of it. The wall in front of her was ripped open this time, her trinkets and her journal floating in blue fog as if frozen at the moment of an explosion.  
  
Emily marched onto the torn flagstones without caution. What traps would the Outsider try to set for her tonight? The timepiece was not visible on her belt, but she felt it like a vibration against her arm where it brushed her hip.  
  
No games today, maybe, no lures like the Abbey said the Outsider set for unaware children. The master/slave of the Void came not in the form of the leviathan, not in a curling sea-creature that moved around her with its coils. No - especially now that she knew how he had come to be here, the Outsider appeared to Emily as just a man with his coat buttoned to his uncut throat. He sat on a round hump of rock like the back of a whale, his hands clasped between his knees.  
  
Emily kept marching.  
  
“Did you think I would not see?” he said.  
  
“See what?” Emily asked, almost before she could rethink it. The Outsider was a terrible and great force, but he was also a familiar figure, almost a cousin. He could stand to hear some fighting words.  
  
“The Timepiece that you’ve stolen.” The Outsider disappeared in a burst of feathery, inky darkness. By the time Emily turned around, with speed that had saved her life so many times, he was already standing behind her. “Nothing happens to punish the people who think they can steal from me. Sometimes that’s even a worse punishment than one I would have meted out. They want attention from me, Emily Kaldwin, they want me to dote on them like high towers and loudspeakers and stained-glass windows.”  
  
Emily sat down on the rock. Take a position of power, she thought, to keep him off his guard if he can possibly be thrown there. Would replying with _you never asked for it back_ be too vague?  
  
“You never asked for it back,” she said. “I keep it with my mother’s Heart.”  
  
The Outsider’s expression soured. “When the sea begins to dry up, the first to notice will not be the sailors. The urchins in the pools will know.”  
  
“What does that mean? Am I the urchin or the sailor?”  
  
“I think you are something else,” the Outsider said. “But you are watching.”  
  
“And you’re the sea?” Emily was probably glaring at him, she thought. Her patience only extended so far. There was fondness too, though, which made her unsure of what exactly the Outsider saw when he looked back.  
  
“You have already refused one gift. Perhaps this is a replacement. Perhaps you took it to balance the scales. Or perhaps … I gave it to you after all, and don’t remember. The witch’s power bleeds me, Emily. Thousands of years, and I have rarely been so lost.”  
  
The Outsider stumbled. Emily extended a hand only to pull back, wondering whether he would perceive the gesture as presumption or servitude. Lost? What an admission. When he blurred again he reappeared sitting beside her, almost close enough to touch.  
  
Emily didn’t think that the Timepiece balanced out anything. “I didn’t want to be like her in the first place. That’s why I refused your Mark.”  
  
The Outsider opened his mouth as if to say something, but then stumbled again. Emily ducked, convinced for a moment that she had been hit before she realized that she and the Outsider had been struck at the same time. Not an attack but a psychic … wall, an attack dog, slammed between them.  
  
Flowers bloomed like bursts of blood on the Outsider’s chest and arms. He slumped to Emily’s side on the rock. She stood, but the world seemed to turn, and when she sat heavily back down again the Outsider’s head lolled on her shoulder. His was not quite a physical presence; it felt as if she had touched a cold fog.  
  
The flowers grew, and either the magic forcing them into existence or Emily herself was becoming stuck in time, slowed and pinned down by it. She tried to move and could not, while something in the back of her mind told her that it would take a year for her to lift her wrist, an age for her to turn her hand. The roses, though, twisted and opened toward the un-sky. A stem wound around the inside of her arm and opened a soft flower studded with thorns. While she watched the rose the stem kept growing, creaking slightly (could she see it pulse as water was pushed through it?), and wrapped around the Outsider’s arm as well, tightening. The thorns reached him first, although there was no blood where they breached his pale skin.  
  
Roses grew like a forest, binding them to one another and to the rock and to the Void. Emily’s thoughts seemed to work slowly. Confused, she needed to re-check and examine every idea, but there was barely enough time in a life for that. The roses were Delilah’s messengers and the roses were Delilah, and the Outsider turned toward Emily with curled lips and wide eyes like pits, and the thorns were creeping toward her skin, and this time they would draw blood.  
  
Emily stood up.  
  
Thorns snapped and stems turned harmlessly into air. The Outsider collapsed onto the stone where Emily had been, roses growing even more thickly around him until he almost disappeared. Emily was not a thing of the Void and so the Void’s illusions could not take her, but him/it/them - _us,_ the Outsider had said before, as if the Void was myriad.  
  
The Timepiece blurred beside her, and, well. She had committed theft before. Nothing would stop her from taking the Outsider’s prize possession again now.  
  
Instead, she drew her sword.  
  
The cut was messy, but as she had suspected, it was the intent that mattered. Roses split like bloodfly sacs under a knife. Petals and thorns rained over the Outsider, but he brushed them away. One wide-eyed look at her and he disappeared into black smoke, embarrassed or furious or both.  
  
“So this is what we’re fighting …” Emily muttered.  
  
The Outsider manifested behind her again, free of roses and silhouetted in the white light from the portal. He shook the last traces of the rose petals off of his hands. Behind him, one of the owls from the Conservancy flapped through the blue fog, huge and silent.  
  
“Will you take the Timepiece now?” the Outsider asked. His voice was so calm; he might not have exerted any energy at all in the struggle.  
  
“I won’t watch the tide go out and not do anything about it,” Emily said. “But don’t think this means I owe you anything.”  
  
The Outsider nodded, and rubbed at a place on his arm where a rose had grown. “Empress Kaldwin, I think you are far too old to believe that debts are that simple.”  
  
Emily had become far too used to other people’s pronouncements of her fate. She took his words as permission, and stepped back into the portal, and took the Timepiece with her.

* * *

_Breanna,_  
  
_I remember spring frost. There are these winters when you think the spring will never come, are there not? You watch the bare branches and wait and try to find some slight evidence that buds are growing, and then the last frost comes. I remember flowers. Blue-black and dappled they were, growing at the foot of the black rocks at Dunwall Tower. Their leaves were soft and pliant, and ever so slightly sticky._  
  
_I know that your work at the Conservatory was cut short. I know that you yourself were cut short, the magic taken from you. Our witchery is not all in whale oil and bursts of blackness, Breanna. It is within us, in our philosophies, in our ideas - in those late-night talks when we spoke of the growth of fungi and ferns, spores and spirals._  
  
_My mother told me there were never any such flowers at Dunwall Tower at all. She knew the grounds well and knew the corner. I was young, Breanna. I said the flowers grew as high as my chest. She said that kind grew in Karnaca but not up here in the colder climes. They were used as poison, other places, so rare that we didn’t have the antidote. I would have been able to remember what they smelled like if everything hadn’t stunk of the sea._  
  
_When you come to the castle you will walk on the parapets. I’ll just look at you for a while._  
  
_After my mother told me the black lilies could not have grown by the corner, I went back to look for them. The dirt was not even disturbed. I looked high and low for the clippings._  
  
_When you come to the castle I’ll pick some black lilies for you. This time, they’ll be there. I’ll be sure they will grow right on that corner._  
  
_Yours,_  
  
_Delilah Kaldwin_  


* * *

The fight up the hill to Dunwall Tower was brutal and disheartening. Emily’s stomach churned, less from the blood and more from the one Overseer, his voice so young behind the mask that it almost cracked, whom she had found ducked behind a woodpile on the steepest part of the hill. He had spoken with such relief when he recognized her as the _unmarked_ one of the royal family. He spoke as if they shared some kinship, and she had left him with a pack of witch-hounds sniffing for his bivouac.  
  
Witches guarded the yard, reclining on the blackened grass still dotted with oil from the attack. No point in spending time on wishing she hadn’t had to see Dunwall Tower taken twice, but it was with relief that Emily kept to the side of the lawn, not looking at the hill. For a moment she navigated by her mother’s grave, then it was almost easy to sneak behind the barricades either the coven or Dunwall Tower’s defenders had erected.  
  
Climbing onto the tower without being seen would be far more difficult.  
  
In the shadow of a corrugated wall, Emily hesitated with her hand on her collapsed sword. As she surveyed the side of the tower to get the pattern of the witches’ patrols, one rooftop caught her eye. Her eyes widened. She thought for a moment that the witches must have been able to see her because she had hackled, but no one reacted.  
  
Emily and Wyman had sat by that eve, once. There had been soot on their hands after. She had looked at Wyman with intent to memorize their features, so that she would have something to keep when Wyman traveled.  
  
She drew out the timepiece, turned it toward the entrance hall of her home, and opened the tines. Dunwall Tower had never been caught in a particular juncture in time like Stilton’s manor had, and so she did not know what to expect when the lenses cut open their breach in the air. The light in that other time looked familiar, though. It brought her to a summer, her ideal image of what a humid Dunwall summer should look like. She remembered the slap of the flat of a blade against the outside of her arm and the brown hair on Corvo’s neck and chin, a scruffiness he had adopted so recently that she didn’t always recognize immediately. She had been so young, that summer.  
  
She stepped into that other world.  
  
In the present time there were two witches patrolling the front door of Dunwall Tower, one on either side. Emily marked where they were standing as she walked through the summer in the past.  
  
There were people here too; guards further down the lawn, two nobles at tea in the gazebo. Emily moved as fast as she could in a crouch, dashing the last few steps before a guard could turn to look at her. The sun was not just brighter today but hotter, immediately drawing out sweat on her face under her scarf. In particular, she did not want to look toward the gazebo.  
  
She flicked the timepiece again. The witch’s shoulder was inches from her nose, rose stems tangling over very pale skin. Emily hooked one arm around the woman’s face, covering her mouth, while Emily stabbed the short blade of the sword in under her ribs.  
  
It was not a quick death, but the jolt of the knife against the bones was familiar, and Emily knew that the woman would bleed out here after Emily was gone.  
  
She unfolded the timepiece again in her right hand, and the witch disappeared from within the hook of her arm. Emily still held the sword, the blade now coated with purple gore.  
  
She spun to the side, where the second witch would be standing. Someone had probably raised an alarm in that other time, and someone would do the same in this one if they saw her with her sword like this. She hurried to close the timepiece, just as a shout was raised from the bottom of the sunny lawn. It could have been a guard or a happy courtier, but either way, Emily replaced the scene with the second witch, who was just turning around.  
  
Emily drove the sword up again. This time the woman had enough time to scream, a haunted shout that resonated in Emily’s skull like a headache. None of the other witches were in her line of sight, though, and no green glowing patches marked the places where gravehounds might howl. Emily let the the witch fall and turned toward the door.  
  
Had she been quiet enough? She had been through so many battles in which she wasn’t sure that she would live that the feeling of standing on a precipice of her life was almost common, but somehow she was never ready for the clarity after the adrenaline, the strange brightness of the relief when she was almost certain that she had done the job the right way. She opened the doors to Dunwall Tower with this mix of terror and certainty.  
  
What would have happened if the guards had seen her in the past? It wasn’t like Stilton’s manor, where she would have been recognized only as a brazen thief. If anyone was likely to recognized the masked form of Emily Kaldwin, it would be here, in that past. And why had she been sent to that particular time? There were no anchors in time here, no breaks. Maybe she had created her own anchor by thinking of her training with Corvo.  
  
What a time to practice a new weapon.  
  
The corridor had been barricaded. A small gap at the top let in golden light from the foyer, but the barricade made of furniture was too high for her to see into the room. The rest of the hallway looked dusty and diseased, as if she had been gone for much longer than she had. The walls were the same, and really, they had always been this imposing. Dark rock meant to take a smack from a siege weapon protected the hall, but where it had seemed grand (if also drab and restrictive) when she was a child, it now felt ready to close in on her.  
  
Candles burned in half-hazard groups on the floor, slowly feeding piles of wax.  
  
Emily turned to the left, where she thought a small storage room might provide her a less conspicuous entrance into the hall.  
  
Two more witches reclined on dirty mattresses there. Emily ran toward them, intending to kill both in the small space before they could cry out. It felt cruel to destroy both so intentionally, so head-on, but the small room made finesse almost impossible.  
  
Both witches lashed out, filling the hallway with vines as sharp as spears. Emily flattened herself against the wall, raising the sword and timepiece as ineffective shields. A vine sliced along her shoulder, and she shook out the Timepiece again.  
  
This time, the first thing that came through the glass was the silence. The witches’ screams and the slice of the vines through the air was replaced by the fragile, echoing presence of Dunwall Tower in its glory. The present day disappeared, replaced by the bright hallway in carpeted and lighted finery of the past, waiting for the arrival of some visiting dignitary. Emily could almost feel the preparations going on behind the scenes. She had been raised to be able to read the atmosphere in the towers like a weather vane, and now - someone was visiting.  
  
She took a deep breath, reassuring herself that she was far away from the witches’ line of sight. So far away. The edges of the timepiece looked darkened, like copper going green. Had she imagined that they were brighter before, or was there something wrong about using the device outside Stilton’s manor? The Outsider had not taken it back from her, although he had said that there might be consequences. Perhaps she was so much more comfortable using the timepiece than any other powers of the Void because part of her felt as if she had stolen it. It had not been a gift, given out of pity or any other reasoning.  
  
Then, hushed voices caught her attention. Two people were arguing at the end of the hall. Neither of them were looking at her. One wore Dunwall Tower’s black-and-silver livery.  
  
“This is unacceptable,” he said to a hooded woman with a bundle in her arms. From the back, Emily couldn’t tell how old she was. The guard was taller and broader than she was, though, and he stepped forward as if to use that to his advantage. “His lordship will soon arrive. You’re lucky we brought the rest from the kitchen earlier; no one will even notice it.”  
  
The woman under the hood shrugged, then stilled. The guard allowed it.  
  
Emily pressed her back against the doorway as the woman turned around. For the second in which she beheld her Emily saw that she was young but tall, with a narrow face that implied a deep-rooted seriousness. Then Emily flicked the timepiece.  
  
This time she felt a moment of disorientation, a copper stain on her own vision as she jumped back and forth just long enough to avoid the girl’s sight. The dark corridor of the witch-infested castle cast her into shadow ever so briefly. Then she returned to the past, wondering exactly how far she had traveled. The Kaldwins kept tradition too well; so little about the furnishings of the fortress had changed.  
  
The girl with the bundle was still there, though, so Emily must have succeeded in skipping through time like a needle through thread, always returning to the same level plane. She smiled, allowing herself momentary pride, and followed the girl toward the elevator. When the girl stopped short Emily did too. Something had surprised her around the corner, and it was a surprise that lasted. The girl was frozen.  
  
“Hello Delilah,” said another voice, young and rich. “You can just bring those upstairs.”  
  
“Are they here yet, Jessamine?”  
  
“We’ll see. The lords are meeting upstairs.”  
  
Delilah’s posture went so still as to look mechanical, but Emily might not have heard their next words if they spoke any. A rushing sound filled her ears as Jessamine - young indeed, so much so that she was shorter than Emily - glided forward and busied herself at the elevator controls. Emily darted into the shadows at the other side of the mechanism and saw Delilah headed down the stairs to the basement kitchen.  
  
If Jessamine’s voice had not been slightly different than Emily remembered, Emily might have been frozen in place. The inflections were the same, certain words drawn out longer than others. Emily knew that she spoke the same way, that Corvo sometimes self-consciously caught himself adopting the high-born Kaldwin accent. Jessamine’s voice was higher, though, enough so that Emily didn’t quite feel like she was looking at her mother.  
  
She wasn’t quite, she supposed. Emily hadn’t been born yet.  
  
But that thought was too mad, too silly, not relevant at all to this moment. Standing in the same place as Jessamine again made Emily feel heavy.  
  
She wanted to watch Jessamine, but with the elevator starting to move, the likelihood that the young empress would spot Emily increased. Instead, Emily followed Delilah through the doorway, walking heel-toe in her effort to be silent. She knew very well that these boards creaked.  
  
Leaving her mother behind felt like pulling one of her limbs off.  
  
“We’ll see.” Delilah muttered to herself as she descended the stairs. “She knows full well I won’t. How long ago did she say we were sisters? Almost blood, and never mind that I don’t have a sister.” She hesitated over the last few words, not overcome with emotion but pronouncing each deliberately, as if testing whether she was going to cry.  
  
Emily hesitated at the doorway. At some point she had sheathed her sword; now she ran her fingers across the doorframe, marveling that she was standing in the same place as the younger Delilah. She had said she didn’t have a sister. The two girls were dressed differently, but now that Jessamine had taken the box into the elevator, it would have been difficult to tell from the quality of their clothing whether one of them was royalty and the other was the baker’s apprentice. Delilah wore finery - maybe hand-me-downs. Jessamine had sounded so sincere about her dismissal, so certain that she was doing nothing wrong by excluding Delilah from whatever meeting was taking place upstairs.  
  
Emily felt suddenly out of place, as if she too had been invited to a meeting, but had no idea what it was expected to be about. Her fingers curled, her grip tightening on the wood as if she could squeeze the doorframe into a better shape to hide her.  
  
In the present time there had been no witches in the front hall other than the two Emily had escaped, so she headed back to the front of the castle.  
  
The guard Delilah had spoken to was now pacing near the door. Emily edged past him, flicking the timepiece open just as she crossed the lintel into the foyer and the guard turned toward her with a surprised shout.  
  
When the world changed in front of her again, she saw that an Overseer had been crucified in the front hall.  
  
One of his hands hung almost to the floor. The blood pooled inside made it look bruised.  
  
Emily’s lip curled. Her own mistrust of the Void had endeared her to the Overseers, but to see the gristly tableau was to feel a mix of feelings. She understood, now that she knew the Outsider’s history, how the Overseers had created their own enemy by sacrificing a person to the Void. She understood that the abbey was corrupt, dabbling in rune-lore and conspiracy. She knew that even some Overseers practiced Outsider-worship in secret. The witches saw none of that, though, and understandably so. They had been on opposing sides of a war with the Overseers that was much more cleanly cut than Emily’s own relationship with the abbey. Dunwall Tower had been consecrated, once.  
  
She supposed that now the consecration would have to be re-done.  
  
Footsteps on the staircase sent her retreating along the wall to the shadow of the marble stair. The witches hadn’t been able to remake this room completely yet, but Emily knew that it would difficult to track the patterns of the new occupants. On the other hand, her glimpse into Jessamine and Delilah’s pasts had reminded her that she knew the guards’ routes throughout the fortress like the back of her hand. It would be much easier to travel through the Dunwall Tower of three months ago, if she could get there. Maybe she could even warn someone.  
  
But what would that change? Would information so recent get to Delilah, get to Kirin Jindosh, and change Emily’s present time as it had change Aramis Stilton’s?  
  
The witch’s footsteps grew louder. Emily opened the timepiece and concentrated on an image of the foyer as clean and empty. Maybe on a still, warm night she would be able to move through the room almost unseen.  
  
She found an afternoon instead, the change in the light almost as disorienting as the sudden beat of a headache just above her right eye. The dead Overseer was gone, the red carpets and gleaming tiles of the foyer stretching out in front of her. The room smelled different, too, an earthy smell of sweat and old tobacco that she realized Corvo had brought with him from the stained walls of the Hound Pits.  
  
Two guards would be patrolling at the top of the stairs, she knew, and then saw one come around the corner. She zigzagged across the stairs, keeping the high wall between her and the man, until he turned back again, whistling, and crossed out of her line of sight.  
  
More, louder footsteps sent her fleeing across the side hall. She pushed a curtain to the side and let the heavy edge curl around her, hiding her from view. The headache had faded. What a mercy. The timepiece hung from her left hand. She tightened her grip, making sure the lenses didn’t chime together.  
  
What a strange place to be, surrounded by the smell of her home. Wanting to make her stay seem more permanent, she tugged a bonecharm from where it had been tied inside her coat, snapping the blue string. Would it change anything about her future? She placed it in the corner, then looked up, startled, as someone’s shoe poked out from the curled curtain opposite.  
  
The little girl wore a face that Emily had once seen in the mirror. Looking at herself produced a feeling of unreality, as if she were looking at a mirror or a portrait. The younger Emily was maybe eight years old, with pudgy red cheeks.  
  
Emily remembered this. Had the memory always been there, or had it just been generated at this moment, because she had done this? How would she ever tell, when memories by nature seemed to come from the distant past? She knew what would happen next. Corvo had suspected an assassin in the castle. Two of the guards had been fired, protest unspoken but evident on their tight, furious mouths. Emily would think of them later when she thought of the people Dunwall Tower was supposed to protect: vulnerable, fallible, and angry.  
  
And Corvo had found the bone charm. Corvo had explained to her what it was, had run his thumb over the sooty marks on the side and shown her the Mark on his hand. It had frightened her, the way he spoke of the Outsider as both an enemy and an ally. Magic was unpredictable, and Emily had been supposed to be learning precision…  
  
The Emily who had never taken the Outsider’s Mark met the little girl’s eyes. “I’m not an assassin,” she muttered. “I know an assassin would say that, but I’m not. You’re doing fine.”  
  
The younger Emily darted around the curve of the curtain. This wouldn’t be the only time she felt unsafe, Emily thought. This encounter might have made more of an impression if the rest of her life hadn’t changed so dramatically after. Her mother was probably still alive in this time. How would Jessamine react to an assassin appearing inside the tower with no warning? Emily hadn’t known her long enough to speculate any more. Doing so felt disingenuous. She had never known her mother as one adult to another…  
  
It was this introspection as much as anything else that kept Emily from using the timepiece again as heavier footfalls approached the curtain. The younger Emily had disappeared from her line of sight, but she knew the hushed sound of those particular soft boots on the foyer floor. She knew that Corvo could make himself silent in those boots if he wanted to, but that he stepped very deliberately around his family, knowing that they would navigate by where they heard one another.  
  
 So this sense of navigation caused Emily to wait while Corvo stormed around into her line of sight He wore a black shirt buttoned to his throat and he had a killing look, and by the Outsider she had never been on the receiving end of this fury before. Still she waited a moment, looking at his clean-shaven face and thick brown hair not yet dotted with gray, while Corvo saw a woman with her face covered menacing his daughter.  
  
When Corvo reached for his sword, Emily opened the timepiece.  
  
This time, she knew as soon as she opened it that something was wrong. The glass was darkening, spidery cracks appearing not at the blackened edges but also on the bright lenses inside. The power felt like a tug, a tangible movement from place to place instead of the smooth change that had happened before. She was left feeling as if she had been dropped onto the ground in a new place.  
  
So much of the world into which she had arrived was white: the thick clouds overhead, the fog over the ocean in the distance, patches of snow on the grass. It was a Dunwall winter, and it struck fast through clothing she had tailored to the sweating climate of Karnaca. Emily snugged her arms around herself, looking again at the cracked and blackened timepiece as she did. She stood alone on the moor. The waves crashed behind her, and when she turned she saw a long, steep slope to the cliffs and the sea. Far out toward the horizon were indistinct gray shapes of islands. One disappeared as she watched; not an island at all, but a whale.  
  
Someone had built a stone house just over the curve of the hill. Emily’s fear shifted fast from what she would do if she was completely alone to what she would do if she wasn’t. How far into the past had she traveled, that there was no city here? She tentatively started walking toward the top of the hill on which Dunwall Tower would be built.  
  
The one-room building was just over the ridge to her right. In another time she would have been able to see the city over there, the streets that had once been filled with plague corpses.  
  
Instead, she was drawn to something closer to the top of the hill. It was a spot that looked like an entrance into the Void, a little dot of blue energy as bright as a second sun. Had she made this rip in the world? Was it a portal that had always been there under the tower, now buried in a basement or a stone wall? She looked nervously back at the house as someone opened the door.  
  
A tall, thin woman stepped out into the wind and peered at Emily through small, dark eyes. Her first reaction was one of more curiosity than suspicion, as if people came onto the moor rarely and without intent to steal what few possessions the woman had. She raised her hand in a sign that Emily didn’t recognize, her fingers pressed together to make a round shape.  
  
It was, Emily realized a moment later, the same shape as the portal on the top of the hill.  
  
Had people lived side-by-side with the Void from the beginning of time? Had there always been practitioners, people so close to the Void that it didn’t matter whether or not they spoke of it?  
  
Emily did not know how to reply. If she was going to be thought of as a phantom, she would do her best to be a mysterious one. The backs of her legs tensed as the hill became steeper, though, and she thought that it might be disingenuous to pretend to be something she was not. She did possess the power of the timepiece, though, so was her magic a lie?  
  
She had wanted so badly to avoid this type of question.  
  
Just steps away from the portal, she opened the timepiece again, hoping and fearing that it would work the same as it had before and take her back to the witch-run Dunwall Tower rather than somewhere even more alien.  
  
When the scene changed, she was standing in a workshop with an open door behind her.  
  
The footsteps she could hear through the door at her back were far more frightening than the flowers and bits of bone on the table. She recognized the paneling from Dunwall Tower’s chapel, but Delilah had desecrated the room as was her wont. A gnarled tree grew beautiful and strange along one side of the room, with a space like a black pit between it and the slowly rotting wooden panels.  
  
Delilah stood just in front of her, working on something at a desk. Her back was so thin, Emily thought.  
  
She had thought she was back in the present, but it seemed that the timepiece had taken her to a time just minutes before she had arrived at the tower. Its powers were becoming erratic, and she couldn’t count on it sending her where she wanted to go. It looked like she would have to rely on her own blade and skill again. She tried to breathe silently through her mouth.  
  
Well, she had gotten this far that way.  
  
There was no way for her to escape through the room without Delilah spotting her, though. The open balcony on the floor above her was just low enough for her to climb up, especially because the tree offered some handholds.  
  
“You're always watching,” Delilah murmured.  
  
Emily did not move, but a flare of fear surged into her stomach. Delilah wasn’t talking to her. That ‘always’ elevated the accusation out of Emily’s ability. Even if she was considered a symbol of the Kaldwin line, the dark eye over Delilah’s life, there were more likely targets for Delilah’s observation.  
  
“You keep to the Void like a rat in a hole, hating your power and playing with those who possess it.” A soft laugh, full of the sound of relief and comfort. Delilah spoke to the Outsider, Emily realized, and she thought that she had won a victory over him. She was too close to her goal to even need to gloat.  
  
To escape the room, Emily could climb the Void-tree out of the close, cluttered room the chapel had become, but then she would be putting her back to Delilah and would undoubtedly be detected. The timepiece in her hand had begun to feel lighter as it rusted.  
  
“You’re so besieged by my briars and your own gifts,” Delilah spat. “And Emily, who refused the gift out of some privilege or piety! She never knew what it was to be without power, so she so easily threw the opportunity away…”  
  
The nausea grew, fear sitting in Emily’s throat. Keeping it there like something rotten she had eaten seemed to keep the fear from muddling her head. She could set it aside, and knew with certainty that she needed to use the timepiece again. The Void had gotten her this far inside the fortress, so it could certainly get her to the throne room where she might find Corvo and find another way to dispatch Delilah. But what to do once she got there? Or, she could kill Delilah right now and bring the whole bloodfly nest down upon this room The revenge would be satisfying. She had vowed not to kill Delilah, once.  
      
Delilah’s voice startled Emily enough to still her hands, one on the timepiece and one on the sword.  
  
“You argue with me in poetry,” Delilah said. “Stop pretending that your gifts are some effort to be righteous!” She brought down one fist on the desk, but the hit was almost soundless. She hunched further down over the table. If the Outsider talked back to her, Emily couldn’t hear his voice. Perhaps there was some Void-presence, invisible to her, a cold shroud like a shrine winding into a blue sky heavy like cloth.  
  
“She is …?” Delilah startled and turned around.  
  
She called out in words Emily didn’t understand, some invocation that might as well have been nonsense to Emily’s ears. The room seemed to swim, the colors spilling out of the paint on the table and the leaves of the tree. As the timepiece opened the edges seemed clarified, hard and transparent as ice while the hot paint colors surrounded it. Emily concentrated on the icy shards, frozen as she focused on opening them further. Delilah surged forward, her face pale and pinched. The timepiece clicked open.  
  
The world became a swirl of color, Delilah’s paint-magic surrounded her. Emily breathed in deep and found that the color had become something else entirely: the breath caught and then passed through her like a ghost, breathable but strangely still and light. Her clothes felt baggy, waterlogged, and she fought to pull the sopping mask off of her face.  
  
 She floated, alone, in the sea. Delilah was gone. In front of Emily, the blue shaded into purple and black. Both the timepiece and her sword were also gone, swallowed by whatever medium now surrounded her.  
  
_After all that rejection,_ Emily thought, _I finally almost reach my goal and then get taken by the Void._  
  
She felt watched. There were shadows around her, impressions of creatures that she were sure were whales or essences of whales.  
  
Emily started to swim. She could kick at the water and feel it as solid as the sea outside Karnaca, although there was no sensation of temperature and little sensation of forward movement. The Outsider had to be here somewhere, didn’t he? She had been taken outside of time into the Void,  or before there was time and only the Void remained.  
  
Emily kicked.  
  
“I know you’re here!” How she sounded like Delilah, her voice trumpeting out toward some answer that no one else knew. “I’ve broken it. I’ve broken your time contraption, and I’ll give it back to you and be on my way.”  
  
There was no answer. The shapes in the distance resolved into whales indeed, huge as the horizon. Emily’s fear burned in her throat, but she also felt protective toward the animals. Her city lived on their backs, and the Void seemed to take them as its avatars more readily than it took humans. Karnaca’s streets were wet with whale oil just like Dunwall’s, and perhaps this was the result of all that diligent industry: a sea of oil divorced from the creatures that birthed it.  
  
_I’m not one of you,_ Emily wanted to insist. The terror grew not that she would be eaten by the whales but that she would look down and find that she had become one. _I’m not of the Void. I will not be taken like my mother was and turned into a tool to speak whispers into someone else’s ear. I am my own sovereign and —_  
  
A wave broke over her head, a real one this time. Salt water choked her, and suddenly the weight of the timepiece and the sword were back in her hands, dragging her arms down. Whitecaps ran along the top of the black water, and when she looked up in desperation to breathe she saw the familiar shape of the hill, the moor where Dunwall Tower would have been/would be. There were stars overhead, and her skin was goosefleshing and her hair trailing across her face where her scarf had been masking her.  
  
On the hill in front of her something was crawling out of the sea. A big beast, it rolled side to side as it walked with stumpy legs and pushed with tendrils on its piggish nose.    
  
Others followed it Emily swam toward shore. Once she got her breath back she had no trouble holding herself above water, even though metal should have weighed her down. She let this magic carry her as she  floated toward shore, staying clear of the pod of animals. Whales, she thought. Whales with legs. She had seen illustrations of birds with claws on their wings, Pandyssian exotics that natural philosophers called half-lizards. These too were half-things.  
  
When she was close enough to the shore that the bottom scraped against her boots, she pushed at the water around her, trying to remove whatever magic had cushioned her. Willingly, it left.  
  
The Void rose out of the sea beside her. It was the color of the empty ocean she had left, blue shading to pink through purple, the color of the water on rare fine sunsets. It manifested as a loop, an arc standing partly out of the water. In the center was an absence, a shape waiting to be formed. Emily couldn’t look at it for long.  
  
The loop was just part of this unformed Void, after all. She could see other parts around her, loops and spheres of nothingness taking cuts out of the world. Some hunched on the horizon like islands, like pods of whales.  
  
“What is this?” Emily breathed, and the Void did not answer.  
  
By the time she dragged herself onto the shore, tripped and soaked by waves, she understood. This was the Void before the Outsider, seeping into the world. She put the timepiece down on a rock and watched the whale-pigs come in, rolling against one another and rooting greedily into the dirt with their tendrils once they found solid ground. This was a Void the abbey feared, maybe, a Void more chaotic and less chained than the one she knew. The Outsider’s Mark was a hole in the world, a perforation through people that let some of this Void leak out, and the Outsider was the gate that kept it all closed.  
  
The whale-pigs kept rooting. Emily wanted a notebook; if she could have sketched these to show to her teachers she might have been told she was being fanciful.  
  
“You can’t speak, can you?” she said to the loop of Void-stuff standing in the sea. “You don’t have a voice yet.”  
  
The Void did not reply.  
  
Emily folded her sword. Her hand had clenched around the hilt so hard in the cold water that it took her a moment to consciously loosen her fingers.  
  
“I think I broke your timepiece,” she said. “I think I was sent back to a time I shouldn’t been able to reach.”  
  
She stood, flicked the timepiece open again.  
  
To her surprise, the scene shifted. Reality blurred like oil on water at the edges, but she arrived intact upon the same shore with the work of many years on it. Trees had grown, gray bark and gray-green leaves of pines. The gaps in the world hadn’t moved, but there was more evidence of life around them now; scum on the lip of the Void, a small skeleton matted with yellow fibers at the mouth of one of the spheres of Void-stuff. Seashells littered the shore, not the small black mussels that crowded the hulls of harbor ships, but shells as big as a human skull, bone-white and striped with brilliant orange.  
  
The tops of the trees shook as if in the wind. Emily walked along the beach toward the sound, sheathing her sword.  
  
When she came to a break in the trees she saw the beasts pulling on the treetops. As big as whales, they walked with a smoothness that seemed impossible under their huge weight. Spines on their backs clicked together as they moved. Each creature took a mouthful of entire branches and stripped them of leaves and needles. Their skins were gray as whales’, long heads and necks shading into an almost metallic blue dark as Emily’s own coat.  
  
Something else moved in the bushes. Emily edged backward, awed by the size of the creatures and disoriented by the land. There should have been a lock here, not this gentle slope. Where was the island where the lighthouse would be? This shore had changed until it was unrecognizable. How long must it have taken, for the sea to carve new channels for itself?  
  
She moved further into the show of the trees, away from the clearing in which the creatures tore at the forest. If she could bring any one of Dunwall’s natural philosophers here they would be occupied for months, years, observing these beasts…  
  
Breath was pulled into lungs and snapped off with a phlegmy sound like a plague victim. Emily spun toward the shadow of the forest.  
  
Birdlike shapes were moving through the woods, fast in their familiarity with the trees. Feathers stood up on long heads like those she had seen on trophy beasts. At first their footsteps were almost silent, but when they spied her they changed direction, attention shifting from the other beasts - surely too big to eat - to the smaller thing on the shore.  
  
Emily drew her sword.  
  
The first creature to poke its head out from the shadow of the forest was pale gray, lighter than the ones around it. It was young, its camouflage not as thickly developed. Fluffy white feathers stood out between the smoother gray coat. It sniffed, shifting back and forth on two legs as it decided what she was. From the look of the talons on its feet and the curved claws on its hands, it was deciding whether to eat her. With her back to the sea, Emily kept the sword pointed at the bird-beast and wondered whether it would help to shout when she jumped at it.  
  
Instead, one of the pieces of Void reached out and snagged her feet.  
  
All of Emily’s fear disappeared. Her arms hit the ground, her body now tossed onto a hard floor with that oil-slick feeling of traveling through time. She crouched and spun, ready to leap at whatever had grabbed her. At the end of her sword she saw a warehouse, of the type the whalers used near near the harbor she had once toured in the early days of her reign. The air smelled like blood and oil and stagnant water and the sweat of overworked butchers.  
  
The Void that hung in the air in front of her now wore the Outsider’s face.  
  
His body was indistinct, wreathed about with black smoke and thorns.  
  
“Leave me alone!” Emily screamed, the fear replaced entirely with anger and relief. “Stop tugging me through time. I broke your device - at least let it stay broken! You would not let my mother rest, and now this - ”  
  
“Let me tell you a story about a woman,” the Outsider said.  
  
Outside the empty storage room Emily heard the industry of the butchers, machinery clanking and heavy footsteps marching on concrete.  
  
The Outsider said, “Last time we met you said that you had disregarded my Mark because you didn’t want to be like Delilah. You know she and I and you are bound to one another, as surely as these roses are to me now. But I think it is something else that is keeping your royal hand from touching these gateways that open in the earth.”  
  
Emily caught her breath. She wanted to demand to be taken back to Dunwall Tower, but to ask for more from the Outsider would be equal to letting him toss her into whichever scene in time he pleased. Emily was tired of that.  
  
“Let me tell you the story of a young queen who knows the intricate chaos of remaking a single violent city. She thought that it would be more _direct_ not to touch the Void. And, well? She was right. She’s the hero of this story, after all. But the villain is slowly making the city her own, making it into an alien landscape the empress does not understand.”  
  
“Maybe you’re right,” Emily said. “Maybe I don’t want to be preserved like my mother as a disembodied heart, as a metal thing. I want to be only myself. I do not have to last forever. I don’t have to see the beginning of time and the end of it in order to know that.”  
  
But she _had_ left herself stranded. Emily worried at the thought.  
  
The Outsider smiled. “You’re right. Which is why I’m going to send you back, to the time in which you belong. You’ll right Delilah’s wrong there, although I do not deign to scry enough to see how exactly you’ll do it. But I told you there would be a price when you stole my timepiece.” A smoky hand gestured toward the open doorway onto the warehouse floor. “Here it is.”  
  
Emily looked out.  
  
The killing floor she had expected to see, with whale corpses hung still breathing in the rafters, was not there. The cavernous room was empty, dust starting to fall in untended corners as men took the last of the equipment away.  
  
The Outsider glided to her side. “The whales are gone. The last pods have swum out into seas so deep and stormy that no ships can follow them. The city is a curse to them. The industry is dying, and as it goes people will find new ones: steam from the air, bones from the earth. Your city will make this change no matter how old you are when it comes, unless you change the ways the whalers go.”  
  
“And you’re showing me this to punish me?” There was a certain melancholy in the walls, a claustrophobic shine to the dust motes in the light.  
  
“No! I’m letting you know that the work is ahead of you. That will be punishment enough.”  
  
She turned to him. She wasn’t sure now whether the workers would be able to see her if they looked into the empty storeroom, but the Outsider’s face was clear to her. “And now we’re even. No more agreements, no more bargains.”  
  
“Your heart is ever your own,” the Outsider said. “There is one more thing that you should see. After that, I will return you to your own time and will be unable to help you any further.”  
  
“I’ll consider whether this is the kind of help I will ever want again,” Emily said, and regretted it. There was little enough change in the Outsider’s black eyes, or in the stony expression of his pale face, but she felt as if she had lost her temper in front of a diplomat. There might not be any consequence for her city today, but he would remember.  
  
“Thank you for returning me to my time,” she said.  
  
“My essence is still wounded by Delilah’s thorns,” he said impassively. “To stop her would be more than enough repayment.”  
  
The words brought clarity back to Emily’s muddled thoughts. As the world melted around her again she raised the timepiece, to make sure that she didn’t know whether she or the Outsider opened it.

* * *

One more vision. One more side effect, something else that the Outsider of the Void-before-the-Void wanted Emily to see.  
  
She was standing on the lawn in front of the gazebo. Jessamine sat there, shockingly young and shockingly pale and shockingly alive. Emily had been deposited behind her, and she felt ridiculous ducking behind a hedge when all she wanted was to cross her teenage mother’s gaze. Too much would be disrupted, though. She had already effected her own life. She chose the hedge.  
  
And Delilah was sitting beside Jessamine. Their faces did look almost familiar, both pinched and arch. Jessamine’s black coat was buttoned to the chin, while Delilah wore a loose smock and a brown apron. It would have been difficult to say that one was younger than the other from their faces, but Jessamine was taller, and moved with more stiffness as she took the piece of paper Delilah held.  
  
Emily couldn’t see it from her hidden place. (There were guards watching Jessamine, of course, liveried men on either side of the gazebo. She knew the timepiece would give her one more escape, though.)  
  
“Father says I’m not supposed to look at the drawings people make of us,” Jessamine said.  
  
“I found it behind the kitchen. It’s just a resemblance.”  
  
“They made me look terrible!”  
  
“I don’t think it’s terrible. The paintings in the castle are so stiff and boring. If I wanted to see those people I could look around the corner. This one is drawn with so much energy. It looks like someone else.”  
  
“You’re only looking at the energy because it isn’t supposed to look like you.” Jessamine pushed the paper into Delilah’s arms. “It’s silly. And hurtful. They made me look like a decorative doll.”  
  
“You don’t like the full skirt? Look at the rouge.”  
  
“And the piles of gold? It’s making fun of me! That should be clear to you.”  
  
“Well, sorry that I can’t also be the talk of the town,” Delilah said, and stood. Jessamine’s expression was plain on her face; either she had not yet learned to be cold to courtiers or she did not worry about making faces in front of Delilah. Jessamine did not stop her when she left. Emily watched Jessamine’s shoulders sink, her head lower in shame or anger. What were she and Delilah to one another? Emily still did not entirely know. She watched Delilah, the caricature crumpled in one hand, walk toward the harbor.  
  
Then Emily opened the timepiece.

* * *

Finally, the last tableau. The Timepiece was blackened and immobile. Emily had returned to the castle, returned in fact to the room in which Delilah had nearly spotted her. On the table she had found a rune burning with dark, cold smoke, and a note - this could unmake Delilah, could trap her in her own fantasy. It almost seemed like a kind ending for her. It was what she had wanted.  
  
Emily had indeed climbed the tree, wary of witches, and found her way to the throne room without ever using the timepiece again. She had tied it to her belt as a reminder of yet another power she would not use, and moved quietly, as her father had taught her.  
  
The world Delilah had created for herself at the top of the tower was a wilderness of dead trees curling in on themselves. Such an artist; Delilah had made her sculpture garden a place of only black and white. Perhaps this was what Dunwall had looked like to her, a city both sanitized and dead when it should have been reeking with life.  
  
Delilah was always fond of distractions and baubles, so Emily knew not to pay attention to the person sitting on the throne. Delilah’s living statues haunted her, but she found their maker lost in her own thoughts at the top of the maze, and silenced her like any other person.  
  
She carried the unconscious Delilah back into the ruined throne room. She knew exactly what Delilah would say next. It didn’t take time travel to know that now.  
  
“The Outsider was trying to tell me stories about myself too,” Emily said, and pushed Delilah onto the throne.  
  
Emily backed away as energies began to work on Delilah, but she could hear clearly the words that were shouted at her. “I saw you in this guise once before, in the garden. What powers do you have?”  
  
Emily spread her hands. “Just the power to take back my tower, I guess.”  
  
“You say you defy the Void and yet you change the world as willingly as I do. We could make something together - but no. I don’t want you as part of my coven, Emily Kaldwin. I don’t want you as part of my world. Go back to when your mother was a child, back before she learned to be cruel.”  
  
Emily sighed. Delilah was growing more quiescent, sinking into the throne that she had coveted. Sagged, she looked like she didn’t belong there but was glorying in her disrespect.  
  
“I know I wasn’t always the best ruler,” Emily said.  
  
“You turned down so much power.”  
  
“Was that it? You think I wasn’t cruel _enough_?”  
  
“You could have taken more.”  
  
Emily raised her unmarked hand. “I also knew exactly how much I wanted to take.”  
  
And the red and green and brown of her portrait blended into the air around her. They left afterimages the color of the shells on the beach when Dunwall was wild. Squinting, Emily saw Delilah walk into the painting of her own accord and disappear.  
  
The witch’s shoulders slumped as she did it; not resignation but relaxation, a mirror of the attitude with which she had sat down next to Jessamine to show her the drawing.  
  
Emily set the timepiece on the floor and knelt in front of Corvo.  
  
“Father,” she said as the statue-skin began to flake away from him. “I’m here to rescue you.”

* * *

In the Void, the Outsider dusted rose petals from off of his hands.  
  
The corruption had faded. The island had disappeared, shuffled back into the Void like a gambler’s most prized card. He breathed a sigh of relief, and opened his hand to reveal one thing he had kept. Within the Void, the bonecharm didn’t give off any particular energy. No smoke was needed to tell that it was something special and particular, since everything here was. Delilah had been partially right in her goal to pin symbolism to the nature of reality.  
  
The Outsider thought about this, and looked at the bone charm that Emily had left in Dunwall Tower, and could not quite remember being the Void before the whales were in the sea.  



End file.
